The prior art for artillery rocket lethal warhead packaging includes unitary high explosive bombs, autonomous or semi-autonomous submunitions designed to attack armor, and anti-personnel payloads comprised of hundreds of fragmenting, explosive filled cluster munition bomblets. In order to construct the cluster munition warheads, cylindrical cluster munitions are installed into longitudinal holes in large cylindrical foam overpacks. Multiplicities of overpacks are installed into longitudinal holes in large cylindrical foam overpacks.
The rocket dispenses its payload by means of an explosive bursting charge in the warhead bay that splits the warhead skin along pre-scored longitudinal lines, disintegrating the cylindrical foam overpacks and scattering the cluster munitions into the air stream around the rocket. The explosive bursting charge is black powder contained in a plastic cylinder that extends the entire length of the warhead bay. The artillery rocket payload dispense event is extremely violent and energetic, since the burster must rip apart the metal warhead skin and widely disperse the payload of cluster munitions.
Kinetic energy (KE) rods have been used in the past in artillery shells and in small direct fire rockets, but never in an indirect fire artillery rocket. The prior art artillery shells used a large number of extremely small rods that were dispensed by a central bursting charge for effect within a short distance of the dispense point. The rods lost velocity and effectiveness very quickly due to their low mass and random orientation dispense method.
The aforementioned direct fire rockets utilized an explosive charge behind the rod payload cavity to dislodge the warhead nose and to dispense the single cluster of KE rods into the air stream ahead of the rocket body. Neither of these techniques is applicable for use in an indirect fire artillery rocket.
KE rods are currently fielded in a US Air Force delivered dispenser weapon system. However, this weapon operates in a much lower velocity regime than a supersonic artillery rocket; thus, its payload dispensing system is not applicable to the present invention.
No currently utilized munition packaging techniques are appropriate for use with artillery rocket KE rod payloads. If the rods are placed directly into the rocket warhead bay, they are dispensed in random orientations and quickly lose their velocity and lethality due to air drag. Installing them into foam packs and then installing the foam packs one at a time into the rocket is labor intensive. Additionally, the explosive forces needed to break up the foam packs and expel the rods from the rocket would cause many rods to be damaged during dispense. Further, many rods would be dispensed in random with ineffective orientations. This foam-pack arrangement would tend to dispense the rods as large numbers of tightly packed small clusters. These clusters would be dispensed along an axis several feet in length, so that the poorly oriented rods and random foam fragments from the forward clusters would be likely to have fratricidal impact with one another. Thus, the effectiveness of the warhead payload would be severely degraded.